[antiRepublicrat]

while the PC became popular because IBM released its design to the masses for free

Not quite. We have Bill Gates to thank for just licensing MS-DOS to IBM instead of selling it, allowing him to later license it to other manufacturers that would come. Second we thank Compaq, which reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS which was of a "strict proprietary nature," and clean-room wrote its own to avoid IBM's "phalanxes of attorneys," thus beginning the clone revolution.

[Imal]

Good points both. I remember the BIOS wars myself, and stand corrected on those points.

The openly published bus and other technical specs nonetheless blew open the doors for de facto standards in small computer peripherals and literally gave competitors the blueprints for PC clones.

History is witness to the results, and the entire Mac/PC discussion is heavily influenced by them, including this thread and the very reason it exists.